Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast

In this episode of Make It Mindful, Seth talks with Christina Rose - co-founder and chief marketing officer of RIVET, which funds micro-grants for youth-led social innovation in 66 countries - about what actually changes in a young person when they're trusted with real resources, and what schools might take from that. RIVET's model draws on Christina's two decades in cause marketing, including work on the early launch of Bono's (RED) campaign.

Together, Seth and Christina explore RIVET's founding premise - that young people globally lack not ideas or drive, but access to capital - and the three-part framework Christina uses to describe what they actually need: financial capital, social capital, and imagination capital. They dig into why youth-led solutions to local problems tend to outperform top-down interventions, using the stories of Walter in Uganda and Stanley in Nigeria to show what that looks like in practice. They talk about patient capital, what it takes to bring skeptical communities along, and what both RIVET and schools are trying to do when they create space for young people to lead. The conversation ends somewhere Seth doesn't always get to go: a direct conversation about what education is fundamentally for, and why that question matters more than most schools are willing to admit. Walter's project, which started with a single $250 grant and a secondhand sewing machine, reduced teen pregnancies in his village by 65% within four years.

Christina Rose is co-founder and chief marketing and growth officer of RIVET, an organization that channels the collective consumer power of Gen Z and Gen Alpha into micro-grants for youth-led social innovation across 66 countries. She spent 20 years building brands at the intersection of profit and purpose, including work on the early launch of Bono's (RED) campaign and in strategic marketing at Thorn, the child-safety technology nonprofit founded by Ashton Kutcher. She holds a BA from Princeton University.

About the Host: Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Make It Mindful: An Education Podcast. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators - building the kind of structured, human-centered learning the podcast explores. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/programs/global-cohorts